State weak on campaign finance laws

Rarely does Washington set an ethical standard worthy of imitation. But it is a fact that when it comes to campaign finance, the federal system is heavily regulated with strict limitations on who can give and how much they can give to affect elections.

Already-rigorous disclosure laws have been strengthened in this congressional session. The hidden transfer of campaign money to an entity with an instruction that it turn around and transfer the money to yet another entity is, at the federal level, called money laundering, and it merits up to 10 years in prison.

Embarrassingly, Alabama elections are governed by some of the weakest campaign finance laws in the country. Both parties benefit from a regime in which a few influential donors bundle massive amounts of money and then legally launder it through a maze of untraced political action committees.

When the Alabama Legislature reconvenes next year, the odds are that it will fail once again to enact meaningful campaign finance reform. I would urge the Legislature to prove the critics wrong by fundamentally overhauling the ways campaigns for state and legislative office are financed. The first step should be the enactment of a cap on contributions from individuals, corporations and PACs: all three should be topped at $10,000 per primary, runoff or general election. Second, as is now the case at the federal level, campaigns should have to identify "bundlers" who raise relatively large amounts and whose individual contribution masks their real influence.

I also agree with The Birmingham News that the laundering of money through an alphabet soup of secondary PACs should be banned, and that all PACs should have to file quarterly disclosures of their own contributor base. The current system permits the unseemly practice of donors disguising their contributions and, as a result, their agendas from public disclosure.

In addition, future governors should be banned from appointing their political contributors to state boards. While I harbor strong doubts that former Gov. Don Siegelman would have been prosecuted without the injection of partisan politics into his case, it is time to end the Alabama tradition of campaign donors surfacing on state boards that should be apolitical in nature.

It is said that neither party has a real stake in cleaning up a system that offers neither transparency nor checks on excess. But this bipartisan embrace of the status quo has made state and legislative races inaccessible for good candidates who can't win the backing of a few well-heeled allies.

It has also elevated the role of interest groups in vetting and eliminating politicians who aren't slavishly dedicated to their agenda -- a development that is adding to the level of vitriol and ideology in Alabama politics.

Another result of our closed system is that the kind of grass-roots, small, donor-based fervor that has lifted up Barack Obama on the left and Ron Paul on the right has been unimaginable in our state's politics.

Not surprisingly, many voters who feel locked out of the money game in Alabama tune out state contests. Our turnout in state and legislative races continues to lag behind presidential election levels in our state, by as much as 17 percentage points in this decade.

The best laws will not deter politicians without an ethical filter. But a stronger set of campaign finance regulations would erase the perception that a subset of the wealthiest, most connected Alabamians enjoys the most access to our government. If our neighbors in scandal-plagued Louisiana can elect the son of Indian immigrants governor on a wave of promised political reform, our politicians in Montgomery can get serious about bringing our campaign laws into the 21st century.